Tag Archives: Demographics

News

Britain’s Office for National Statistics predicts looming demographics crisis

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Here’s an article from MercatorNet. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Britain is bracing itself for the ageing of its population with the latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that the proportion of people aged over 65 is set to rise dramatically.

[…]The fastest growing age group has been been 85-and-over group –now referred to as the “oldest old”. This group has doubled to 1.3 million since the early ’80s;

By 2033 the number of people aged 85 and over is projected to more than double again to reach 3.2 million. It will grow to will account for five per cent of the total population;

The article is filled with statistics about the increasing number of retired seniors. In Western countries, seniors depend on the government social programs for pensions and health care. A lot of countries had a baby boom in the 50s and 60s so that a large number of of people are retiring. Unfortunately, due to feminism and the sexual revolution, the numbers of new workers has been decimated by hedonism, the breakdown of the family and abortion. So who is going to pay the income taxes needed to provide for the larger number of retirees?

Today, there just aren’t enough new workers to pay for all the social programs. Either the younger generation will have to be impoverished by high tax rates, or the older generation will have to be denied health care. In one sense this actually just, because the same generation of people that introduced their children to feminism is going to face the consequences of their worldviews. Young people were taught hedonism and that sex is recreational. Saving money and having children took a back seat to careers and having a good time here and now.

When a person expects to be taken care of by the government, they don’t save their own money and they worry about having more children to take care of them in their old age. The government started the whole wealth distribution game in order to equalize the life outcomes of people who worked and saved to pay for their own retirement and health care, with those who didn’t work and save. This caused those who were working and saving to slow down or stop, since it was now the government’s job to take care of people.

I also think it is interesting that the left-wingers who complained about “overpopulation” are going to finally find out exactly how badly they miscalculated. There is one group of people still having lots of babies. Muslims. And when they become the voting majority, a lot of multiculturalists will be surprised to see their liberties vanishing. In particular, special interest groups on the left, e.g. – feminists, will have their liberties curtailed. And so, feminism will have set in motion demographic forces that led to its own destruction.

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Commentary

Keith Hennessey explains the looming crisis of entitlement spending

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This is the best post I have ever seen on the problem of demographics and entitlement spending, which is due to explode in about a few years. I’ll summarize so that you will click through and read this post for yourself. There is almost no text in the post, it is all graphs, and they are self explanatory. It will take your about 5 minutes to scare yourself into a coma.

Summary of the post:

  • There are 3 entitlement programs: social security, medicare and medicaid
  • These programs are funded by taxes on young people who are still working
  • These 3 programs currently cost 9% of GDP.
  • By 2050, the costs will have doubled to 18% GDP.
  • Some of this increase will be due to excess growth in health costs
  • And some of this increase will be due to demographics

Let me talk more about the demographics problem:

  • More people are living longer
  • That means that benefits are being paid out over more years, per person
  • A huge group of babies from the Baby Boom started retiring in 2008
  • But the number of younger workers who pay their benefits is not growing fast enough
  • The number of workers needed to pay each retiree’s benefits is shrinking
  • Taxes will have to increase, or benefits will have to decrease

Please read the article. It will help you to put Obama’s massive spending and tax hikes in perspective. By the way, this is a great post to forward to your friends and neighbor’s who voted for Obama who do not like to read about economics and finance.

Podcasts

Free speech: Mark Steyn radio interview and Ezra Levant radio debate!

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UPDATE: Welcome visitors from Blue Like You! Thanks for the link Joanne!

Canadian/American free speech activist Mark Steyn on the line with Chicago radio show host Milt Rosenberg. Commercial free!

Extension 720 – Mark Steyn – June 1, 2009

URL : http://www.wgnradio.com/media/mp3file/2009-06/47337079.mp3

Duration : 1 hours 29 mins 26 secs

He re-caps the history and outcome of his trial in Canada for offending Muslims, and goes on to discuss his previous book “America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It” and his new book “Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West“. He reviews the state of free speech, Western Civilization, single-payer health care, welfare, anti-Western attitudes in education, and the 2008 election results.

BONUS

Ezra Levant reports on his debate against secular-leftist professor Lucie Lamarche on CBC radio. Note that the start time is 1:12 into the show. Press pause, let the clip buffer for a few minutes, then drag the slider to the 1:12 position.

Last Sunday I was on Michael Enright’s CBC radio show, The Sunday Edition, debating human rights commissions along with Keith Martin, the Liberal MP, and a nutty professor called Lucie Lamarche.

You can listen to the show here — it’s the May 31 edition. The debate starts at about 1 hour and 12 minutes into the show.

[Lamarche] loses her grip at 1:25 when Enright challenged her on the lack of due process and natural justice in HRCs. Her first response is to dismiss the horrors of HRCs as my own personal story. When I pushed back, citing the very section of the Alberta act that allows warrantless search and seizures, and pointing out that targets of HRCs don’t get legal aid, she just collapsed, saying that “discrimination is about attitudes… and transformation. It’s not only about due process.”

Oh. So to hell with the law or fairness. Guys like me need to have our attitudes transformed. It’s not law. It’s brutal politics pretending to be the law.

I like this Lucie Lamarche — for her honesty.

After a few minutes of her reading her talking points — likely authored by the battallion of PR flacks at the Canadian Human Rights Commission — she just stops pretending that HRCs are about justice. They’re about politics and propaganda — making political dissidents like me conform to the “official line”. And the high costs? That’s just an additional punishment for our thought crimes.

Seriously: when she ran out of her prepared talking points, she said what she truly believed: this was about transforming attitudes.

Ezra also hints at which kind of people fight back to defend human rights, and what kind of people destroy human rights:

Readers, do you think that Orwell or Solzhenitsyn would call Lamarche a defender of human rights, or a destroyer of them?

Do you think that giving the state the power to transform your attitudes is a protection of your freedoms, or an abridgement of them?

Do you think that Lucie Lamarche follows in the footsteps of dissidents who challenged the conventional wisdom, like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi — or is she a descendant of the censors and bullies who tried to shut those two up?

Do not miss this debate podcast! Ezra is on fire!

And remember: we know that the secular-left believes in pounding down the good and lifting up the evil, so that moral judgments become impossible and no one feels badly for being morally evil. Remember Evan Sayet’s explanation for how progressives think: moral equivalence, postmodernism and moral relativism. And atheists do not have the ability to resist Islamo-fascism: they want to be happy, not to be heroes.